The Other Election

There is really only one plausible scenario in which Republicans could enact some version of Paul Ryan’s radical, government-shrinking budget plan during the next two years. That would be if Mitt Romney wins the White House and Republicans eke out control of the Senate in November. (The Democrats now hold the Senate by a 53-47 margin.)

Otherwise, at least until the congressional elections of 2014, the country will have some form of divided government—partisan gridlock, as it is usually called. That is because Republicans almost certainly will hold control of the House of Representatives this year, according to professional election forecasters. Even if Obama is reëlected, then, he will have to govern, as he has since the Tea Party’s rise in 2010, in a constrained muddle of veto threats and negotiations, administrative rule writing, court battles, and political-appointment fights.

The American electorate has voted repeatedly to create this sort of stalemate. Optimists about the wisdom of democratic crowds perceive a collective wish for checks and balance; some of us darker souls see a country paralyzed by moneyed special interests, and at war within itself. In any event, in the thirty-two years since 1980, the party that has held the White House has also controlled both chambers of Congress for a total of only six years, or less than a fifth of the time—the Republicans after the September 11th attacks and the Democrats for the first two years of the Obama Presidency.

The possibility that such a rare eclipse could again pass over the capital on November 6th is why this fall’s Senate races are turning out to be wild, often entertaining, and engorged by Super PAC spending.

The Presidential race does not give off much of a feeling of high stakes; that race involves two cautious, cerebral, poll-tested, heavily produced candidates who cling to message and go negative with scripts vetted by focus groups of swing voters. Some of the Senate races, in contrast, look like Three Stooges punch-ups.

In Florida, Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, is in a dead heat with Republican congressman Connie Mack IV (half-Mack, as he is known to those who thought his father, Mack III, was a better politician). Nelson’s TV admakers introduced their Republican opponent this way: “Florida, meet Connie Mack IV. A promoter for Hooters with a history of barroom brawling, altercations and road rage…” (Incidentally, Florida Politifact, a fact-checking nonprofit, rated Nelson’s ad “Mostly True.” The group’s only quibble was the ad’s implication that Mack still works for Hooters, which he does not, now that he’s a member of Congress.)

There is also a trend down-ticket toward candidates whose names make for bouncy rhymes: Heidi Heitkamp (the Democratic nominee in North Dakota, a former attorney general); Linda Lingle (the Republican nominee in Hawaii, a former governor) and Tommy G. Thompson (the motorcycle-riding former Republican governor of Wisconsin, familiar from his stint in George W. Bush’s cabinet.)

The Senate hopefuls have more interesting qualifications, too, than their Presidential counterparts, chiselled Harvard men that they are. In addition to Mack’s consultancy with Hooters, there is, once again, Linda McMahon, of Connecticut, the former leader of World Wrestling Entertainment, who lost two years ago to Democrat Richard Blumenthal; she is polling remarkably well in a race for the seat being vacated by Joe Lieberman, who is retiring. More inspiringly, in Arizona, the Democrats have nominated Richard Carmona, who dropped out of high school in New York to enlist in the U.S. Army; he fought with Special Forces in Vietnam, pursued a medical degree, and then worked as a nurse, a paramedic, and an emergency-room physician. (In 2002, George W. Bush named Carmona as the U.S. Surgeon General, but he now stands with Obama.)

The Republicans have struggled to nominate such bedrock Senate candidates. Whatever mechanisms of restraint and discipline led the party faithful to suppress their Tea Party-inflected rage and lift up the bland but plausible Romney broke down in Senate primaries. In Missouri, Congressman Todd Akin—he who recently imagined out loud that female bodies might defuse pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape”—defeated Sarah Palin’s preferred candidate in the primary, as well as a self-funding businessman who dumped $7.5 million of his own money into the race. Two years ago, extreme conservatives like Akin did badly in general-election votes in many statewide races, and yet this fall, even after the debacle of his rape comments, which led to Akin’s excommunication by Romney and the leading Republican Super-PAC purse-holders, polls show Akin in a virtual tie with the Democratic incumbent, Senator Claire McCaskill.

Depending on which professional prognosticator you prefer, between four and six of the thirty-three Senate races are today judged to be toss-ups, and another eight or more are very much in play. That is a scrum with few recent precedents.

Nate Silver, the statistician who oversees the Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog, wrote a few weeks ago that the most likely outcome looked to be a virtual tie—fifty Republicans, forty-nine Democrats, and one independent, Angus King of Maine, a former governor, who hasn’t said which party he will caucus with, but who is being treated by Republicans as a Democratic surrogate. If King did win and caucus with the Democrats, as in Silver’s scenario, that would mean control of the Senate—and with it, committee chairmanships, the floor calendar, and the ability to pass at least some budget legislation by simple majority vote, by evading the peculiar institution of the filibuster—would go to the party that wins the White House, by virtue of the Vice-President’s tie-breaking vote.

Secretive outside ad campaigns have already played an important role. In Maine, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which declines to disclose its corporate donors, has dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars on television ads attacking Angus King, and according to reporting by the Bangor Daily News, Republicans have also set up a political action committee, Maine Freedom, to place television ads promoting a Democrat, Cynthia Dill, in the hope that she might draw votes away from King and create an opening for the Republican nominee.

In Virginia, former Democratic governor Tim Kaine is in a very tight race with former Senator George Allen, Jr., the son of the late coach of the Washington Redskins. They are running for the seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Jim Webb. (Full Disclosure: My daughter has a senior position on the Kaine campaign.) The Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s Crossroads Grassroots Political Strategies have reportedly already placed more than six thousand television ads to back Allen.

From the vantage point of a writer who has been a Redskins fan since boyhood, it is in Virginia that the Senate race has reached its most degrading low.

Last June, Dan Snyder, the Redskins’ owner, and Mike Shanahan, the team’s head coach, co-hosted a fundraiser for Allen, along with Bruce Allen, the candidate’s brother, who also happens to be the Redskins’ general manager. The printed invitation, obtained by the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg, went so far as to appropriate for partisan electoral purposes the Redskins’ hallowed fight song: “Hail VICTORY!”

Donors could be “Tailgaters,” a “12th Man Sponsor,” a “Touchdown Sponsor” or, for twenty-thousand dollars, a “Super Bowl Sponsor.” Here, at least, is an omen to cheer Democrats in a nerve-wracking autumn: Snyder’s record of building losing teams is formidable; the inauguration of Senator Kaine could be the latest product of his acumen.

Steve Coll, a staff writer, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and reports on issues of intelligence and national security in the United States and abroad. He is the author of “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.”